Australia in Fact and Imagination

Australia is emerging as a key participant in 21st-century affairs, both as a barometer of the US-Chinese relationship in the Pacific and as a society still in transformation from colonial past to contemporary modernity. This course, cotaught by a literary critic and a social scientist, will look at the culture and society of Australia in both political and imaginative ways. The key themes—indigeneity, immigration and multiculturalism, war, and the Australian folk legend—will be accompanied by readings of four literary works: Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance;
Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel;
Thomas Keneally, The Daughters of Mars;
and Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang.